Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
into strips that they wrapped around their foreheads. They shook tatters of white. They held up the
soldiers' guns by the barrels, extending the stocks in a show of surrender.
As soon as they landed, Albert and the others were separated from the six rebels.
“What happened to them?” I asked, and he explained that they were sent on to Boende, the cap-
ital of one of Équateur's districts, then on to Kinshasa.
“Were they executed?”
“No,” he said, but then he explained how terrified the FAC soldiers were of the rebel army. All
night, they shot constantly into the air. Albert and the others huddled together, expecting counter-
attacks, but nothing came. Eventually, they realized that the enemy wasn't there. The soldiers were
simply trying to scare off the rebels or comfort themselves. Albert grasped the absurdity of the war,
the front hardly moving, soldiers not wanting to fight, possibly not even knowing why they should,
just wasting ammunition against the night sky, as if the sooner it was used up, the sooner the war
would end.
Albert and his mother traveled 125 miles to Boende and took a boat to Kinshasa, where he con-
tinued to look for work. He went to conservation meetings with CARPE and USAID and explained
potential projects in Kokolopori until he realized that everyone he met was interested in talk, but
that no one was going to give a Congolese funding. He applied for grants and continued going to
conferences, but he told himself that the people he met seemed to have confused conservation with
conversation—an easy mistake, just two letters misplaced, but a world of difference. One night,
having cocktails on the roof of the US embassy and discussing all that needed to be done, he de-
cided that he'd had enough.
By then he was working at the Red Cross, and it was at his office there that he first met Sally.
She explained the need to have the landing strip cleared and found him easy to speak with, enjoying
his sense of humor. He told her his ideas for conservation, about the Fondation pour la Protection
de la Vie Sauvage et de l'Environment, whose name he'd shortened to Vie Sauvage after he'd been
hired at the Red Cross. He'd realized that the unwieldy names and long acronyms so popular in the
DRC weren't necessary. The Red Cross had a simple elegance, so why not Vie Sauvage?
Sally realized that he was familiar with a significant area in the bonobo habitat and open to
working with outside organizations on conservation—that he was exactly the sort of person BCI
should support. Though she was just getting started, Albert agreed to help with the National Geo-
graphic trip, wanting to work with her in whatever capacity. When I pressed him on why he would
be so quick to help Sally, who was struggling to fund herself, he answered simply: “I immediately
saw that she was interested in the Congolese in a way that others weren't.”
When they were together, Sally tried to learn everything she could: words in Lingala; who
worked in what area and what they hoped to achieve; what the people in Équateur knew, how they
perceived the bonobos, the wildlife, and forests, and how they would respond to her ideas. No other
Westerner had spoken to Albert this way. He believed that if he helped her accomplish her goals,
she would do the same for him.
Like Albert, Mwanza saw in Sally an opportunity to expand conservation. He and his research-
ers had their headquarters near Lac Tumba, a lake in the Congo basin on whose shores stood an
old research station built in the 1940s by King Léopold III of Belgium. The building had a lab with
marble-topped counters and a library with topics from the 1940s, and yet, despite foreign conserva-
tion funding being allocated to the DRC, Mwanza's researchers worked barefoot and had no funds
